MLB Opening Day’s disaster area: the bullpen

One day into the MLB schedule, the major league bullpen is already in mid-season form: Unreliable.

The 14 bullpens that saw work pitched a collective 52 and one-third innings Thursday; that’s 43 percent of all the innings that were played. In that time, they allowed 27 runs, nearly 60 percent of all the runs that crossed the plate…and every stinking one of them was earned.

Blame it on the shortened spring if you want, but the facts say otherwise. Bullpens weren’t just bad Thursday; they’re usually bad.

MLB bullpens not close to midseason form

But they certainly were putrid Thursday. Collectively, bullpen arms delivered a 4.65 EWRA, allowing 69 baserunners in their 52.1 innings of work and eight home runs. Two relievers got blown saves, and three others took losses.

Nowhere, of course, did the bullpens perform more ignominiously than in Phoenix, where the San Diego Padres bullpen torched Yu Darvish’s no-hit bid.

Darvish shut out the Diamondbacks without a hit through six innings at Chase Field, holding a 2-0 lead when new Padres manager Bob Melvin opted to play that most popular and dangerous of games, bullpen roulette.

For two innings all went reasonably well. Tim Hill lost the no-hitter in the seventh, but he and Pierce Johnson escaped literal damage.

In the ninth, though, on his third tug of the trigger, Melvin found the chamber with the fatal bullet in it. Robert Suarez walked Christian Walker on four pitches, then walked Pavin Smith on five. A wild pitch moved the tying runs into scoring position before Suarez compounded his problems by hitting Carson Kelly with a 3-2 pitch.

Suarez was dispatched, having thrown 15 pitches, only three of them strikes. But the bullpen problems were only reaching a crescendo. Craig Stammen, who replaced Suarez, wild pitched one run in, then delivered a meatball that Seth Beer hit over the right field fence for a walk-off homer.

It was an extreme failure, but not an atypical bullpen showing. Of the 14 bullpens that saw work on opening day, only two – the Cardinals and Royals – held their opponents scoreless.

In St. Louis, the Pirate bullpen gave up five earned runs, one for each inning worked. Considering the sorry state of the game – St. Louis having scored four off Pittsburgh’s starter – that damage, while hurtful, was not decisive.

In Chicago, the Cubs bullpen surrendered a 3-1 lead, watched the team’s offense restore it at 5-3, then held on for a 5-4 white-knuckler. That meant, by the way, that Milwaukee’s bullpen yielded two decisive runs in three innings.

In Kansas City, Guardians pitcher Tristan McKenzie gave up the two decisive runs in the eighth inning of the Royals’ 3-1 victory.

The Nationals weren’t going anywhere anyway against the Mets Thursday. But it didn’t help matters when Washington’s bullpen allowed three runs in the sixth and seventh inning of an eventual 5-1 New York win.

Managers and general managers alike tout the importance of building a strong bullpen…as if such a thing can be done. Last year bullpen specialists blew 40 percent of their 1,972 save opportunities. That’s a big deal because, coincidentally, 40 percent of all wins or losses were assigned to bullpen arms in 2021.

In an age when MLB team execs are paying their starters more and more while expecting fewer and fewer innings, that’s a reality that turns a game of baseball into a lottery. Throw the relievers out there in mid-game and see how the dice come up. What managers and GMs need to do, instead, is nurture more out of their best pitchers…and those best pitchers are generally not their bullpen guys.